Web services define a new paradigm in present-day collaborative application development in enterprises, and span systems, networks, and organizations. Emerging computing infrastructures provide direct support for Web services technologies. A characteristic feature of the current efforts in the direction of Web services is the inclination towards providing rich and sophisticated tools for leveraging Web services functionality. Though this aids one in collaborative application "development" using Web services, from the point of view of application "design", it leaves much to be desired, when one considers closing in of the legendary "semantic gap" between a collaborative enterprise application and the infrastructure support. In this paper, we propose DEVISE: a methodology for building Web services based infrastructure for collaborative enterprises, comprising applications designed as a collection of Web services and a computer human interface. © 2003 IEEE.